San Antonio Review

He wasn’t there at the time we said.
Someone, a woman, told me he had been
called to work. I asked for him through
the orders window at the Short Stop.
Beside grey Chryslers he asked

if he could make me a hamburger.
I said no, I was alright. The bent
manilla envelope had enough
for a plane ticket. I wish I had $300
to give Enrique, someone had said.

He cried like men cry: inside themselves.
I wanted to cry, too, but I was thinking
about red rice in Haiti, how in Cuba
every day is the cigar festival.
My chest was empty as a glass.

I wrote down my number, but I never
heard if he made it. I think of him,
in an open-air house, birds of paradise
spread warm along mascarpone walls, sipping
coffee tart as a dried cherry, a son in medical school.

I wish I had let him make me a hamburger.
We could have sat and talked a while,
grease and salt on our pillowing fingers,
our lips slick, our skin softening
in the asphalt’s black, residual heat.